Able Seamen
by kangeiko
Summary: Jack and Arvin and getting acquainted. Here there be slash. And also rum. No, that bit is a lie.


TITLE: Able Seamen

RECIPIENT: yahtzee 63 (spy_santa fic exchange)

Notes: Much inspiration came from 'Sea Fever' by John Masefield. Any mangling of his poetry is entire my own bloody stupid fault. Many thanks to my intrepid betas: wingsmith, queenspanky, likeadeuce and most especially athena25, who worked long and hard to make this not suck quite as badly. Anything you like is probably due to their efforts; all remaining snaphus can be blamed on me.

* * *

It was half past nine and a crescent moon, and he was stuck in what must be purgatory with a brass band and ridiculous women with big hair and small dogs. Arvin wasn't entirely sure why he had to be present at this God-forsaken social event, but the AD had insisted and so here he was: formal wear, smile firmly on, and a vacant look in his eyes. To be fair, there was plenty of eye-candy in the form of senior agents' trophy wives, but Arvin had never been one to poach, and wasn't particularly interested in anyone who thought that a cut-out swimsuit, platform heels and bangles was suitable attire for a formal event.

Sartorial snobbery aside, the company wasn't much to speak of and the food left much to be desired - such as flavour, nutrition and quantity - leaving Arvin with the distinct impression that the universe had served him a curveball when the invitation dropped in his lap. Until he had actually arrived at the event, that is, and found that Jack _Bristow_ had also been forced to turn up. Arvin had gotten into the habit of saying it just so in his mind, like Jack was Roger Moore leering at a scantily clad evil minion. "Bristow. _Jack_ Bristow." Parnelli over at Extraction thought it was hysterical: Jack, less so. Arvin's delight had been complete when it turned out (mainly through empirical evidence and a great deal of humiliation) that Jack - Wonder Boy of the CIA, poster child for all that is rugged and manly - got very, very seasick. Not just a little nauseous, oh, no. Jack got sick in the way that small children and pregnant women get sick, complete with a greenish tint to the skin and a stubborn determination to remain on his feet and at the social function despite his frequent panic-runs to the unoccupied part of the deck.

The discovery of this little fact made Arvin's world a much brighter, happier place - albeit one considerably more likely to be covered in vomit, as Jack was turning a disturbing shade of green and grabbing the railing. Sighing in a suitably put-upon manner, Arvin followed, discreetly placing himself in a position where he could shield from view the highly amusing sight of one of the Agency's top men was making a complete and utter spectacle of himself. _Ah, the things one does for friendship,_ Arvin thought, and wondered what favour he would be extracting from Jack in return for this minor baby-sitting task. The idea of 'friendship' was still a little too new, a little too _foreign_ to him - certainly in _this_ job - and staying firmly within the bounds of reciprocity made the idea a lot easier to bear.

Maybe the thought had been a little too pleasing - or maybe his smile had slipped from 'fixed' into 'disturbing' - because a brightly dressed young woman, made three inches taller by virtue of her impressive Farrah-hair, flitted away from them both, her inadequate wrap fluttering in panic.

"You know, my father took me sailing when I was young," Arvin said into the wind. Sharp and stinging as a whetted knife, it took his words up high and whipped them away, stringing them high above the main mast to where the _Helen of Troy_'s colours flung them into the ocean. Arvin watched the sky, oddly charmed by the gathering storm clouds that drowned out the hubbub of the insufferable champagne reception still bubbling about them.

"He did not," Jack said through gritted teeth, unimpressed. "He took you on liners, which is to yachts and sailing what trains are to bicycles." His cheeks were ruddy with the cold, and he shifted from foot to foot, knuckles white on the railing.

Arvin glanced over at him, a little amused. He did not recall ever sharing that with Jack, which meant that either Jack had some rather interesting preconceptions about him already - or that some curious little bird had been dipping into his personal file. _Interesting._ He wasn't threatened by this, precisely; they had only started working together a year previous; it was only natural that Jack should have investigated his background. He'd done the same thing with Jack's file, after all, although it had curiously neglected to mention this strange seasickness. Still. It probably wouldn't do to encourage such unseemly curiosity - at least until they were better acquainted than a mere year's partnership. "Have you helped yourself to champagne?" He asked mildly.

"I have _not_," Jack bit out. He rubbed his hands together and shifted in place again, hurriedly grabbing for the side when an unruly wave tipped them precariously. It wasn't precisely stormy weather, but certainly close enough to it to make ladies' heels and the smooth soles of men's dress shoes inadvisable on a yacht's deck. "I _hate_ these shoes," Jack said angrily, keeping himself upright through sheer willpower and possibly somewhat disturbing quantities of upper body strength.

"Oh, well, with the lack of champagne, the cold, my lack of sailing and your favourite shoes, it's a good thing that you're not in a bad mood, isn't it?" He fished in his jacket and found a plain silver case, snapping it open and selecting a cigarette. "Maybe you should go lie down," he said, only mildly mocking. "It would affect your delicate, sensitive system a little less."

Jack attempted to give him a filthy look but instead ended up doubling over the railing. Six foot two of Canadian brawn in formal eveningwear and overcoat holding a thin scrap of paint and metal for dear life as his stomach rebelled. It was a far cry from a mere six hours previously, when he'd trounced Arvin at the gym without even breaking a sweat. In fact, one could even stretch to calling it somewhat humanising, if one _really_ wanted to piss Jack off.

Yes, Arvin really was enjoying himself immensely.

*

Upon reflection, Arvin thought, maybe he should have called in sick. Or, at the very least, he could have put off doing this 'favour' until a time when the sea was a little less unruly.

Jack wouldn't hear a word of it. "Do you _want_ me to get seasick on our next mission?" He demanded, eyes blazing. "You have been following our luck lately, yeah? - Arvin, the operative word is 'bad'. I can damn well guarantee that we'll get assigned to shadow a drug baron taking a six-month Mediterranean cruise, and I'll spend the first three weeks completely useless."

"Well, we wouldn't want _that_," Arvin said, smiling despite himself. "I'll talk to the AD - but I warn you, if we're going to be spending three weeks incommunicado, he'll probably require an errand run during that time. He's hardly going to furnish us with a yacht otherwise."

"Fine. I do warn you, though - I don't know how to sail, so you'd best study up on it," Jack said, frowning. "None of that 'my father took me sailing' crap - the country club's annual Caribbean cruise does not count."

"Aye aye, Captain," and here the smile couldn't be contained any longer, "but don't forget to pack some travel sickness pills, though, to get you through those first few days of teething."

Jack threw a stapler at his head.

*

And so, here he was: Captain John Smith (terribly original), of the _Ophelia_, quite possibly the worst furnished yacht in the history of the world - all greens and browns and plaid, for goodness sake, whose bright idea was that? She was commercially certified and fully licensed to be off Panama, stocked with a civilian crew (all three of them) and some party-people who were possibly too annoying for words. It took Jack a full week of swaying precariously on deck to get his sea legs, a week where Sloane swore a blue streak whenever anything went wrong with the yacht. Predictably, he was forced to climb the damned rigging with an untested deckhand; by the end of it, though, he was starting to get the feel of the boat, so maybe it wasn't _all_ bad.

First was the crew: civilian, and quite accommodating to the idea of an unscheduled stopover. Arvin left Jack to make the rounds, a little curious to see how he'd cope with it. It wasn't that Jack was untried, but he was untried by _Sloane_, and that made all the difference. Besides, Arvin had spent a week holding Jack's head as he vomited. In some cultures, that meant that Jack owed him his first-born. Arvin hoped for something a little more useful.

After pocketing the crew - and that had taken all of three days - they sent out feelers on the mainland. To anyone watching, they would have been a yacht for hire, carefully set up for the most decadent of parties and soirees; it was only natural that there should be comings and goings at all hours. Indeed, it would be unusual if there _weren't_. In the end, though, it took a whole week of incessant parties for this 'friend' and that one, and of bikini-clad Ambassador's daughters and their thuggish boyfriends, for them to get a message back:

Yes.

In response, Arvin threw a party involving three crates of champagne. In related news, he was very much looking forward to submitting his expense report upon arrival at DC; or, rather, he was very much looking forward to watching Jack submit said expense report. All this for a simple recon mission?

Maybe he really _had_ been partnered with James Bond.

*

So.

Thus far, Arvin's good humour about this lightweight mission had been holding out, despite having his personal space invaded by what could only be politely described as trollops. _Grabby_ trollops, no less, and he was quite happy that his status as 'Captain' kept him a little safer than the rest of the crew. Still, a week tending the ailing Jack and another tending the ailing _Ophelia_ through an up-market frat party had taken its toll on his nerves, and he had passed 'irked' and was fast approaching 'irritable'. This helped his alias, of course - nothing more convincing than a grumpy captain - but it didn't precisely make him popular among the indescribably stupid people cluttering up his deck.

And when, for heaven's sake, had he started to think of it as 'his' deck? He'd never had this issue with cars or trains or even planes - what was it about boats that made them so damned easy to covet? It probably didn't make him all that popular among the crew, either, but that mattered to him a great deal less. There were precisely eight hours between him and freedom: sweet, glorious Miami, where he could deposit the damned yacht and her truculent crew and drag his no-longer-embarrassingly-seasick partner to the next in a series of stupefying social events. Of course, he had to last through the remnants of their 'party': their Intel safely gathered, they'd have to wrap things up relatively quietly and wait until daylight - still some three hours away - to depart. No sense in screwing things up at the last hurdle, after all.

At least, that had been _Arvin's_ reasoning, all the way up until he saw Jack in a state beyond 'slightly tipsy' and rapidly approaching 'cheerfully drunk', surrounded by a bevy of bejewelled girls. The girls' boyfriends - knives and guns and other weapons of choice on prominent display - were watching him carefully, their expressions growing more thunderous by the second. Arvin considered the likelihood that genteelness and elegance and other positive attributes would undoubtedly accrue as they both aged and acquired both grey hairs and wisdom. He also considered the possibility that neither one of them might live to see the grand old age of thirty unless he scooped up his almost-inebriated partner and locked him in a cupboard.

He cautiously approached Jack, who was chatting with an amiable-looking young woman, and tapped him on the arm. "Jack," he murmured, " isn't it time we retired for the evening? We have to set sail early on." The girl stepped out of the way as he spoke, in deference to his rank, and Arvin took the opportunity to slide an arm around Jack's waist and tug him down a corridor and out of sight. The thuggish boyfriends relaxed, and Arvin breathed out slowly.

"What the hell's the matter with you? This is supposed to be a routine mission - a baby-sitting assignment, Jack! - and it's like you _want_ to get caught," he said, almost as soon as Jack's cabin door was locked behind them and Jack stumbled to the nearest bunk, cursing. "Are you doing this on purpose?"

Jack stared blearily up at him. His eyes were red-rimmed and his hair was mussed; his bow tie was gone, presumed lost, and his shirt was half-undone. He looked like he'd been interrupted mid-coitus and, no, Arvin was never ever having that thought again.

"You need to relax a little," Jack said, still smiling that half-aware, half-fucked smile. "I called home is all, Arvin. I'm just happy about that, I haven't been transmitting code or military secrets. I just called home." He eyed Arvin appraisingly. "You outta try it sometime. It's surprisingly nice." He said it with a slow drawl, _niiice_, as if there was something wholesomely depraved in the mere concept.

There's a not-so-small part of Arvin that considered killing him and dumping the body overboard. "You called home during a _mission_?" There were, in fact, no words for just how stupid that particular trick was. "Did that last wave hit you harder than normal?"

Jack didn't seem to be listening. "It's the one thing I promised I'd do, and I remembered about half an hour ago and she was just so happy, you know?" His eyes opened wide, bright as the moon. "It's such a stupid thing, so _small_, but I called home on Thanksgiving and my mother, you know, she was so ridiculously pleased, you'd'ave thought I bought her a house. When I have kids, I'm going to make them call home _every_ Thanksgiving, without fail, until I'm a hundred and three." He rolled his eyes at Arvin's tight expression. "Oh, relax, the most anyone is going to hear is a 'Happy Thanksgiving' and a middle-aged woman reminding me to wrap up well. It's not precisely a case of breaking national security. I only did it because it _is_ a baby-sitting assignment - and, what, the third one in a row? When do you think they're going to stop taking us out for test runs and actually give us something to sink our teeth into?" He smiled wolfishly as he said it, almost laughing.

Arvin was aware that his mouth was still hanging open in a small moue of surprise. There was precisely one thought in his brain, and it currently involved taking Jack drinking until he stopped giving the ridiculous impression of brawn and steadfastness and did that mischievous twist to his mouth again. First things first - what he said? Made no sense. "Jack, it's not Thanksgiving. It's October."

Jack mock-scowled at him, swaying on his feet. "Some friend _you_ are. Did it escape your notice that I'm Canadian?" He did a fair imitation of a Mountie salute and Arvin burst out laughing.

"You're about as Canadian as the Parthenon, Constable Bristow," he said after a beat. Truth was, he was a little surprised at how easily Jack said that word when Arvin had been agonizing over it's meanings and responsibilities and implications for months. If he had been a petty man, he might have considered teasing him about it, but that would open him up to teasing in turn, and he really didn't want to deal with that just yet. Instead, he haphazardly fitted himself on the bunk, prodding Jack into moving across and clearing some space for him. "Move up. I need to sit somewhere solid so I can drink a proper toast to your ridiculously early holiday season."

Jack smiled and rolled over towards him, slow and languid and familiar, his hand still on Arvin's arm.

Arvin's breath caught in his chest, because it is monumentally difficult to get Jack Bristow to do anything he doesn't want to do. Still, Jack's hand was on Arvin's arm, and his smile was wide and wolfish and almost predatory. And maybe Jack wasn't quite as drunk as necessity demanded, because he was quite capable of unfastening Arvin's clothes and removing all the sharp weapons from his person without any bloodshed.

The entire experience was odd and clumsy, and perhaps they should both be grateful that there is a heavy haze of alcohol surrounding it, Arvin's hands digging into Jack for purchase as they tried to work out the logistics of the narrow bunk. "Just, let me - let me -" And then Jack was fumbling with Arvin's fly, popping the buttons and working the zip with clumsy hands that were shaking a bit. Arvin took a deep breath, and looked up at the glare of Polaris shining directly through the cabin porthole, casting too much light on this unnecessary, unneeded, wholly extraneous and completely irresponsible drunken indiscretion. They were too good for this, too _professional_, damn it, and all rational thought fled as Jack pushed past the last layer of cloth to the skin beneath. His breath hissed out of him in a sharp gasp.

Oh, they were going to regret this in the morning, but he could still hear the slow murmur of the sea outside, slow and languid and familiar, and, somehow? It didn't matter quite so much.

*

fin


End file.
